There is an ongoing and urgent need to reduce consumption of energy and water both for environmental and cost reasons.
A large proportion of the energy and water supplied by utilities suppliers is wasted as a result of inefficiencies such as use of electrical appliances that have poor efficiency or for behavioural reasons such as appliances that are left switched on and so consume electricity even when not in use, or excessive consumption of water. This leads to wastage and increased utilities costs. Moreover, with respect to electricity, electrical energy use in buildings accounts for a very large proportion of all carbon emissions. Demand for utilities can vary dramatically between identical buildings with the same number of occupants, and this suggests that reducing waste through behavioural efficiency is essential. Therefore, efforts are required to change the patterns of utilities use by consumers.
The utilities suppliers recognise three major obstacles to progress in this objective: a shortage of sources of competitive advantage, a lack of detailed understanding of their customers, and a lack of “touch points”, i.e. ways of interacting with the customers. Opportunities for differentiation revolve mainly around price and “green” issues, i.e. reduction of environmental impact. The utilities suppliers have very little information about their customers' behaviour since electricity, gas and water meters collect whole house data continuously and are read infrequently.
Meters to measure total consumption of utilities of a household are commonplace for each of gas, electricity and water, however this total is not useful in identifying areas in which efficiencies may be possible (for brevity, we refer herein to a “household”, however it will be appreciated that the present invention is not limited to a domestic house but may be applied to any domestic, workplace or other setting that receives its own discrete utilities supplies, in particular mains electricity supply from an electricity grid; water supply; and/or gas supply.).
Apparatus for monitoring consumption of a resource such as electricity supplied on a cable is disclosed in WO 2008/142425. While a meter of this type is beneficial in assisting a user to review energy consumption patterns, when the meter is operated in a high resolution mode, for example measuring power consumption at one second intervals, there is a problem in storing the relatively large amount of power consumption data produced by the meter. Further, when the power consumption data is stored by the meter and subsequently sent to a remote device for display or analysis of resource consumption there is a problem in selecting and transferring the relatively large amount of power consumption data stored by the meter. Further, when the power consumption data is stored by the meter and subsequently sent to a remote device for display or analysis of resource consumption, if communication between meter and the remote device is interrupted there can be problems in selecting and transferring stored power consumption data to the remote device.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide technical means for compression, storage, recovery and transmission of utilities consumption data in a household.